I’m tired of thinking about AI and tech policy through an intersectional lens. I am tired because to think about Big Tech, and the industrial tech policy civil society industry using an intersectional framework means to be painfully aware of the harms, injustices and contraventions to human rights and democracy they represent — for people who look like me but who may not have the same level of power I can access. It means to stare into the belly of the beast; to make use of my Eloquent Rage; to acquiesce that the call is coming from inside (and outside of) the house.
Above all, I am tired of using intersectionality to outline the harms. We been knew. As Sydette Harry articulates: “Harmful behaviour toward Black women isn’t enough to inspire change until others are harmed….”
wired.com/story/listening-to-black-women-the-innovation-tech-cant-figure-out
If I’m going to continue to think about intersectional tech policy, I want to think about solutions. Futurity. I want time and space and funding to imagine our technological liberation. I want to think, play, and work with Black women from across the diaspora to create alternate worlds using our in-group knowledges — Black (other)worlding, to cite my brilliant scholar friend, Dr keisha bruce.
In focusing on the potentiality of changing the status quo rather than outlining the issues, I’m not burying my head in the sand. It’s a necessary shift because, in the two years since I published the first draft of an attempt to operationalise applications of intersectionality to tech policy, tech policy civil society continues to operate race-neutral. I wrote:
“[In civil society currently], approaches to intersectional policy-making follow the deficit-based ‘add minorities and stir,’ which aims to eradicate structural inequities in the design and policy-making of tech platforms by inviting Black and Brown people to panels to discuss the algorithmic, hate-speech or platform harms they’ve experienced.”
temilasade.com/blog/intersectionaltechpolicy
The status quo is still status quo-ing if you will. It is my opinion, [and in my experience], that part of the reason civil society in Europe is unable to move beyond the normativity of AI — unable to move beyond deficit intersectional approaches — is because the people who lobby against Big Tech’s influence, and the people who create that tech are the same Venn circle: white people with undue access, influence, and money, who set the agenda about what’s worth building, fighting, or focusing on in our technologically mediated lives.
In addition, when civil society engages with alternate approaches to policy making, there is a complete misunderstanding of what intersectionality means. Intersectionality is not just the inclusion of “diverse voices” and perspectives. It’s not only about identifying and naming intersecting oppressions and indexes of identity. At its core, intersectionality is a framework for understanding and illuminating power and how indexes of identity such as race, gender, and class, combine to fundamentally reconstitute that power.. It’s a useful tool to explain how different axes of social divisions, indexes of identity, and power result in different experiences of discrimination. Intersectionality is a Black feminist epistemological concept, developed by Patricia Hill Collins, Gail Lewis, Audre Lorde, The Combahee River Collective, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Stella Dadzie, Beverly Bryan…and countless other Black feminists who I may never know. I name these women, not only because in writing about intersectionality I am writing about them, but because to do intersectional work requires a centreing of Black women. Therefore, it is imperative that intersectional tech policy addresses how tech harms disproportionately impacts, affects, and results in different forms of discrimination towards Black women.
medium.com/a-new-ai-lexicon/a-new-ai-lexicon-black-women-best-14eb5d059b2a
Serena and I met through Twitter — we both recognised we were ‘Only’s’ — raisins in the rice pudding; the sole Black women in our respective team(s) working in the tech policy space. It’s because of our subject positions, our self-consciousness of being Black in society, a location within the margins; or — our Black women’s standpoints as Patricia Hill Collins’ theorises, that we are able to better “see” how power and privilege operate because they shape our reality. Thus, a Black Women Best framework for AI poses the following questions:
1. What would AI look like if it was guided by Black Women Best?
2. What would AI look like if its focus was to uplift Black women?
3. How would this change the purposes of AI, who is in control of it, and the principles that guide it from development to deployment?
I’m here for these questions.. These are kinds of questions that move us closer to intersectional (AI) policy. But my approach to intersectional tech policy is preoccupied with the web and specifically social media websites, which is what this piece advances.
It would be Somewhere Good.
If, at the heart of intersectional tech policy we centre Black women and their standpoints, then let’s call that a seed. And what would it bloom? Somewhere Good. The latter is the (yes, VC-funded) embodiment of centring the needs of those in the margins, alongside a careful, considered Black feminist praxis, and a desire to prioritise moving slowly within social media. An audio-first platform, it combines ephemeral prompts (the design reminds me of seeds), available for 24 hours. Users can choose to respond to different types of prompt categorised by four worlds (as a true academic, my favourite is ‘deep discourse world) by leaving a voice note response. Each voice note is a bud, and as different users respond to the prompt, the chain of buds continues, with petals blooming around voice notes that are especially popular.
Somewhere Good reminds me of what Derrais Carter, speaking about his project Black Revelry, calls a gathering. It’s “what happens when you gather with folks to create the conditions where they want to share not just memories, but also imaginings.”
It reminds me of Web 1.0, when I would spend hours on Neopets. It feels serene. It’s intimate. And it’s hella Black.
The epigraph to this piece is from Ursula Le Guinn’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay making the argument that the earliest technology humankind conceived was not the spear, but rather something to carry items in. However, I argue it’s also a metaphor for how our standpoints inform our reality. Le Guinn describes how the male theoreticians were happy to have violent cultural beginnings, but Ursula found she could not (or would not) subscribe to this version of humankind's origin story because of her gender, or some other perspective she held. As a Black woman, I do not subscribe to dominant tech policy civil society’s approaches, nor social media companies' modus operandi.
Instead, I am drawn to theories that look at the web and “technological adoption as a kind of Black cultural practice.” I find myself drawn to Instagram pages like ‘Saved by the bell hooks,’ a digital archive created by artist Liz Laribee. This Instagram page pairs quotes from bell hooks with photos from the TV show Saved by the Bell. This remixing of the old with/in the new, highlights the reimaginings possible within the constraints of Instagram’s code. While I love this pedagogical tool, it brings me pause: what does it mean that the a Black woman’s intellect can be used to reframe a predominantly white TV show on a social media app known for algorithmic discrimination against Black and brown bodies? Even more so — if we heed Marissa Parham’s advice and think through social media adoption as Black cultural practice — then who, in this instance, is invited to curate this particular archive?
I want a world where Black women, who sit in the vexed position of being disproportionately abused online, while also being (digital) cultural trendsetters, are centred in policymaking and centred in intellectual and creative technological ideation. My intersectional tech policy [frame]work is subversive protest. It is a glitch. It is refusal. It is dreaming beyond the status quo. It’s my attempt to write myself into the story of technology policy.
But until people start asking “what do you need?” rather than “what can I do?” I remain tired.